The research team, led by Professor Ross Gordon of the UTS Business School, a Professor of Behaviour and Social Change, set out to understand not just what sceptical Australians believe about EVs, but how those beliefs are shared, interpreted and validated within their social worlds. The findings suggest that misinformation about electric cars behaves less like a series of factual errors and more like a community asset: a body of shared stories that people exchange through trusted networks, both online and offline. The researchers describe this phenomenon with a new concept, EV misinformation communities, which captures how loose, informal networks of people can collectively sustain and legitimise anti-EV narratives without any formal organisation or fixed membership.

A central insight of the study is that many of these myths grow from what Professor Gordon calls a kernel of truth. Battery fires, charging access, limited driving range and the environmental footprint of manufacturing are all legitimate subjects of scrutiny. The problem arises when a genuine limitation, an isolated incident or an unresolved concern is stripped of context, generalised to all electric vehicles, or recruited to support broader claims about the technology that are not consistent with the best available evidence. A kernel of truth, the researchers argue, can make misinformation far more credible and persuasive than an obviously fabricated claim, because it gives the listener something concrete to anchor their doubts to.

The interviews reveal how this dynamic plays out in practice. Participants repeated claims about the frequency and risk of EV battery fires, with one expressing fear of a car bursting into flames in the front yard. Others described electric vehicle manufacturing as raping and pillaging the earth, characterised EV drivers as people who cannot drive or are often in accidents, and worried that the absence of engine noise was going to lead to a lot of people getting run over. These are not the polished arguments of organised campaigns; they are colloquial, emotionally charged stories that circulate through social media feeds, family conversations and workplace banter, often beginning as jokes or memes that are later taken seriously.

Professor Gordon notes that some of this material originates as disinformation, meaning false or misleading content deliberately created and spread to deceive or disrupt. Once it enters circulation, however, it becomes misinformation when ordinary people encounter it and share it without any intent to deceive. This distinction matters for anyone trying to counter false claims, because it means the people repeating an anti-EV story are often sincere, socially embedded messengers rather than bad actors. Correcting them with facts alone can feel like an attack on their community or identity, and may even entrench the belief further.

The mechanics of validation are where the study breaks new ground. The researchers found that claims encountered on social media frequently became common currency for discussing EV safety in face-to-face interactions, creating a feedback loop between digital and physical social spaces. Repetition through trusted relationships and familiar media makes the claims appear credible, reinforcing concerns, fears of change and distrust of government and market actors. For some participants, these stories offered something more valuable than accuracy: reassurance. Believing that electric vehicles are dangerous, impractical or environmentally harmful provided an alternative to the message that the transition to EVs is inevitable, making hesitation or continued reliance on familiar petrol and diesel vehicles feel entirely reasonable.

This reassurance function helps explain why EV misinformation has proven so sticky in Australia specifically. Although electric vehicle uptake is increasing globally, adoption remains uneven across countries and consumer groups, and Australia has been comparatively slow to embrace the technology. Vast driving distances, genuine questions about regional charging infrastructure and a long national love affair with large combustion-engine vehicles all provide fertile ground for narratives portraying EVs as poorly suited to Australian lifestyles. The misinformation does not emerge in a vacuum; it attaches itself to real anxieties about cost, control, convenience and identity, and then amplifies them into sweeping claims about the technology as a whole.

The policy implications of the research are significant. The authors argue that addressing EV misinformation will require far more than fact-checking or simply providing additional information to sceptics. Because the false claims are sustained by social trust and emotional reassurance, corrections delivered through official channels may bounce off entirely. Instead, Professor Gordon says, policymakers and industry need to address people’s underlying concerns about cost, control, trust, fairness and lifestyle. They should also work through trusted messengers and networks, and give Australians opportunities to have positive, real-world experiences with electric vehicles, whether through test drives, community demonstrations or exposure to EV-owning peers whose lived experience contradicts the circulating myths.

Building that trust, the researchers contend, will require credible information delivered alongside practical responses to genuine barriers, including affordability, vehicle choice and charging access, particularly in rural and regional areas where range anxiety and infrastructure gaps are most acute. A fair and inclusive transition, they argue, must also create alternative sources of trust, validation and reassurance around electric vehicles. In other words, the answer to an misinformation community is not a lecture but a counter-community: networks of trusted voices and authentic experiences that can offer sceptics an equally credible social home for their doubts to be resolved rather than reinforced.

The study arrives at a critical moment for Australia’s decarbonisation agenda. Transport is a major and growing source of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, and the pace of EV adoption directly affects efforts to mitigate climate change and reduce the health impacts of air pollution. If misinformation continues to shape perceptions, judgements and purchasing decisions, even well-designed incentives and infrastructure investments may underperform. By mapping the social and cultural processes through which EV myths are shared and validated, the UTS team has provided policymakers, industry and communicators with a more realistic picture of the challenge: the battle over electric vehicles in Australia is being fought not in technical reports but in front yards, group chats and kitchen-table conversations, one repeated story at a time.

Subject of Research: Electric vehicle misinformation and consumer beliefs in Australia

Article Title: The electric car myths Australians can’t shake

Article References: The electric car myths Australians can’t shake. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: electric vehicles, misinformation, disinformation, University of Technology Sydney, consumer behaviour, Australia, battery fires, charging infrastructure, climate change, Energy Research & Social Science, social networks, EV adoption

The health stakes of dietary quality are considerable. Poor diets fuel obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and several cancers, and they increase the risk of premature death. In Australia and the United States, roughly one-third of the calories consumed by adults come from what researchers call discretionary foods and drinks: ultra-processed, energy-dense products loaded with sugar, salt and saturated fat, such as chips, burgers and ice-cream. Against that backdrop, the UTS team, which brought together expertise from medical science, psychology and marketing, wanted to understand whether feelings about brands, rather than knowledge about nutrition, might be quietly steering population-level eating patterns. Their conclusion is that aggressive and pervasive marketing of fast-food brands may be helping to drive the increase in chronic diet-related diseases by shaping not just purchases but perceptions.

Senior author Dr Poppy Watson of UTS explained the core mechanism identified by the study. When people develop a psychological loyalty to fast-food brands, she said, it acts as a strong predictor of their saturated fat and sugar intake, regardless of how healthy they perceive those brands to be. This is a subtle but important distinction. Public health campaigns have long assumed that if consumers understand which foods are unhealthy, they will adjust their behaviour accordingly. The new findings suggest the picture is far more complicated, because brand affection appears to operate on a separate track from nutritional knowledge, and on that track it is affection that tends to win.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive result is that people who love fast-food brands actually rate those brands as healthier. Senior author Dr Mike Kendig, a senior lecturer in Medical Science at UTS, noted that nutritional knowledge does play a role in health ratings, but that the strongest predictor of how healthy a brand is perceived to be is simply how much a person likes it. The researchers suggest that repeated exposure to branding builds familiarity and positive feelings, and that these feelings spill over into health perceptions and dietary choices. Familiar logos, jingles and mascots, encountered across retail environments, media, sport and everyday life, may therefore function as a kind of emotional seasoning that makes energy-dense products seem more benign than they are.

The study was conducted in two parts, involving adult participants in both Australia and the United States. Researchers assessed attitudes toward fast-food and beverage brands, measured perceived healthiness of those brands, and administered a comprehensive dietary questionnaire. By combining brand-level affect with detailed dietary recall, the team could test whether liking predicted actual intake of fat and sugar. It did. Participants who expressed stronger liking for fast-food brands not only consumed more fat and sugar overall but also tended to perceive those brands as healthier than less enthusiastic respondents did. The consistency of the pattern across two countries and two separate studies strengthens the case that brand attachment is a meaningful behavioural signal rather than a statistical fluke.

It is tempting, the researchers acknowledge, to assume that the occasional fast-food treat says little about the rest of a person’s diet. The data tell a different story. Liking fast-food brands was associated with poorer overall diet quality, meaning the attachment flagged broader patterns of eating rather than isolated indulgences. This makes brand affinity a potentially useful marker for health professionals and researchers: a simple question about how someone feels toward major fast-food and soft-drink brands may reveal more about their habitual diet than a question about what they believe is healthy. It also suggests that interventions targeting brand attitudes, not just nutritional knowledge, could be a promising avenue for improving population diets.

Dr Watson emphasised just how deliberate and effective the marketing behind these attachments is. Unhealthy food marketing is pervasive in retail, media, sport and other settings, she observed, and companies would not invest so heavily in it if it were not incredibly effective at shaping purchase decisions. It is self-evident that the marketing works, she argued, but consumers are not always cognisant of how it operates on them. The study’s findings give that observation empirical teeth: the emotional bonds forged by advertising are measurable, and they correlate with the fat and sugar people actually put in their bodies. Marketing, in this view, is not merely promoting a choice among foods; it is recalibrating the perceived healthiness of the foods themselves.

The implications for public health policy are significant. Governments and public health organisations invest heavily in nutrition education on the assumption that knowledge helps people make healthier choices. The UTS research suggests this assumption captures only part of the story, because an emotional attachment to a favourite fast-food brand can shape what ends up on a person’s plate despite nutrition warnings. The findings lend support to calls for greater restrictions on junk-food advertising and other government policies aimed at reducing the grip of fast-food giants, such as limits on marketing to children, restrictions on sponsorships of sport, and clearer labelling regimes. Dr Watson argued that individuals need to be aware of how much marketing biases health perceptions and influences eating, but that there is also a broader responsibility to rein in such marketing, because the evidence shows it is shaping diets at a population level.

For consumers, the study offers a practical, if uncomfortable, takeaway: the warm feelings a brand inspires are not neutral. They are the product of billions of dollars of exposure engineering, and they can quietly distort judgments about healthiness while correlating with diets higher in saturated fat and sugar. Recognising that affection for a logo may be a better predictor of diet quality than a nutrition quiz could help people interrogate their own preferences more honestly. For researchers, the work opens questions about how brand attachments form, how malleable they are, and whether reducing exposure could weaken the link between brand love and poor diet. For policymakers, it strengthens the evidence base for treating food marketing as a public health issue on par with tobacco and alcohol advertising. What people feel about fast-food brands, this research makes clear, is not just a matter of taste; it is a measurable force in the health of nations.

Subject of Research: The relationship between fast-food brand liking, perceived brand healthiness and overall diet quality in adults.

Article Title: How you feel about fast-food brands can predict overall diet quality

Article References: How you feel about fast-food brands can predict overall diet quality. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: fast food, brand loyalty, diet quality, junk food marketing, sugar-sweetened beverages, nutrition, obesity, public health, health communication, consumer behaviour, chronic disease, University of Technology Sydney